Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  Was that it, really? No. I’m trying to write the truth here and that is only possible if I acknowledge the truths that I’ve steered away from till now. The truth is I didn’t want to tell Nat because I never wanted to own that he wasn’t mine.

  It was as well Magda had left us Nat’s birth certificate. When I protested, at the time, about her leaving no ration book she said, ‘His name’s Tye and your name’s Tye so if anything happens or you need more milk or anything, you can say you’re his mother and get a green book for you both’. (Mothers with children under five had green ration books entitling them to extra fruit and milk and eggs.) The birth certificate, registered in Hammersmith, stated that Fred’s son, born on 1 July 1940, had been named Nathaniel Wilfred Tye and that his father, Wilfred Acton Lancelot Tye, was a ‘University Lecturer’. Magda was described as ‘student’, though she had finished her degree. Perhaps she was about to begin her worthy-sounding Ph.D. on Marx’s Economic and Philosophical manuscripts of 1844, which Fred, with an annoying note of respect, had referred to. I never discovered because other than that one further visit, when she turned up with some nappies and a few pathetic items of infant clothing, I never saw Magda again. But I often thought about her saying I could pretend I was Nat’s mother.

  In all this time the only word I had had from Fred was one letter, in which he wrote that he’d been detailed into farm labouring work and was headed north where help was required. Since then I’d heard nothing and pretended that I didn’t care. But now something more than my own dented pride became paramount.

  I presumed Fred must know that Magda had had their baby, though to me he’d written nothing of this, and I wrote first to the only address I had to let him know that Nat was with me. I owed him that. I wrote before I learned of Magda’s death but I wrote again, after 22 August, a gentler letter, because I felt there might be no one else to break the news and I wanted him to know that his son at least was safe.

  When I located Fred at last, I took Nat to meet him. Those were days when you could hitchhike with impunity and a young woman with a babe in arms, far from being in danger, conjured consideration from drivers. It’s a well-worn paradox about war, but still worth pondering: the onslaught of terrible destruction seems to trigger a more generous spirit than peace and prosperity has ever brought.

  My letters had gone from pillar to post as Fred had moved from labouring jobs, where the growing Women’s Land Army was thought aid enough for the benighted local farmers, to more physically taxing forestry work. I found him billeted with some older men, who had not yet been called up, in a makeshift wooden shack on the edge of Hamsterley forest, near Durham. A very basic existence but Fred never minded discomfort.

  We arrived, Nat and I, weary from our journey and in my case nervous of our reception. Fred’s first words were, ‘Did you know how many different species of fungi there are?’ which was an ice-breaker because it was so typical. I can see now that he was embarrassed. He conducted me, Nat in my arms, round the forest, pointing out the various species of fungi he’d been discovering, as if conferring on two visitors a tour of his country estates. But I was relieved to judge him apparently happy. He had lost weight but he looked healthy. I suppose, if I’m honest, I was relieved to see no sign that he was visibly mourning Magda.

  It was some while after all this before I felt able to raise the subject of Magda and if he was distressed at all he didn’t show it. He claimed that he had married her to give her citizenship. She was not at that time pregnant, or at least not knowingly, and was only concerned that she might be interned as an alien. I doubt if this was the whole truth. I suspect he had edited, as much for himself as for me, the degree of his feelings for her. But it suited me to let his explanation ride.

  And it was a heady time, prompting many world-without-end gestures which were always likely to prove unstable in calmer days. Already by the time they had agreed on the perfunctory ceremony at a registry office in Marylebone, it was clear to them both, or so Fred maintained, that they were not twin souls. He wasn’t a monster and would have been genuinely very cut up over how Magda had died. But I don’t believe in those days he allowed himself to find any loss too painfully personal.

  Fred’s response to meeting his son was to treat him as if he were the child of a close but absent friend. He conveyed no paternal possessiveness and his first words about Nat were, ‘Isn’t he rather small?’

  ‘Babies are meant to be small, Fred,’ I explained. ‘It’s how we all start. He will grow, you see.’

  He held Nat awkwardly at first and when it was apparent that his nappy was wet hastily handed the kicking bundle back to me. I let him off on the first occasion but when it was time for another change said firmly, ‘No, you do it. It’s not difficult and you’ll have to learn some time.’

  And Nat, who was never a placid baby (Magda’s assurances that he always slept proved about as reliable as the rest of her maternal contribution), lay on a carpet of leaves and smiled contentedly while his father wiped him clean of shit and anointed the two soft cheeks of his bottom most tenderly with Vaseline. Snapping closed the safety pin on Nat’s bulky nappy, Fred turned and beamed and I saw gazing up at me two pairs of cornflower-blue eyes. Somehow, unless she too had some Northern blood in her, Magda’s genes had been superseded by those of the Anglo-Saxon Tyes.

  ‘How about that for a first shot?’ He looked boyishly proud.

  ‘Pretty good,’ I said, and felt for the first time that all might be well and that an important step in Nat’s life had been safely negotiated.

  As we left, I could hear Fred lecturing the other men about the advanced position the USSR took over the division of labour between men and women and what we had to learn from this. Very decently, his colleagues made no comment. I couldn’t see their faces but instinct told me that this kind of oration from Fred was not new to them.

  5

  The winter of 1941 was one of unusual cold and for weeks on end Cambridge lay under a leaden sky. Snow like a cheap Christmas-card illustration decorated the colleges and draped elegant feather boas along the branches of skeleton trees, belying the savage effects on the human population of the steep drop in temperature. Ma, who had accepted Nat as her own as readily as I had, came often to visit, trudging gallantly through the sludgy streets and bundled up in shawls like Mother Courage. Among her other accomplishments was a talent for knitting, a skill which gave her a useful common topic of interest with Grandad Tye, who, less bizarrely in those days, had been taught to knit by his old nanny. Ma knitted Nat jerseys by unravelling her own, so that, well-wadded with layers of brightly coloured wool, he resembled a sturdy Inca baby.

  The war had transformed my mother, ever eager to embrace any novelty, into a champion vegetable grower. The herbaceous border in her garden had been dug over to make a vegetable plot and Ma never arrived at Round Church Street without potatoes or swedes or Jerusalem artichokes, carrying them, like Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise coming to dine with Jeremy Fisher, in a string bag.

  Marion’s room had been taken by a Party comrade, a physics graduate and activist, much revered in the student movement and engaged in hush-hush war work. I didn’t revere him, or his beliefs, but I liked him. I liked his bounding, puppyish, energy and he was a natural with Nat.

  Various student Party members frequented the house. I used to overhear them outlining their plans for the future, and when the subject was literary I was occasionally pressed to participate. The Russian market for ‘decent literature among the proletariat’, I was assured, was immense and insatiable. No Russian writer was obliged to turn out ‘slush’ in order to become a best-seller. Miners and metal workers in the USSR queued eagerly to hear decent poetry. At the time I knew no miners or metal workers but I was far from sure that attending readings of modern poetry would necessarily better their lives. But for all their political ferocity the Comrades were always civil to me so I kept my own counsel and appeared to listen politely.

  To be fair to
my housemate, he put his money where his mouth was – which is to say he made friends not only with the like-minded but with all sorts, among whom were various market stallholders who slipped him foodstuffs and spices I’d never sampled before, which he wizarded into novel culinary concoctions. Nat and I passed many cheery evenings with him, when he was not off discussing how to raise the consciousness of the masses. He had a fine voice and he taught me mill-workers’ songs which I sang to all my children and grandchildren and sing to myself to this day.

  For the first couple of years after graduating I got by financially doing a modest bit of teaching for Newnham and some translation work for an academic publisher. The pay was pitiful but the work itself was soothing. There was something remedial about the old and lambent language of The Vision of Piers Plowman, in which, while Nat slept, I absorbed myself, ignoring, for a spell, the fact that our modern civilization was nightly being hammered from the skies.

  Dad, who was up most nights attending to the Blitz casualties, was able to visit less often than Ma but it was he in the end who persuaded me to leave Cambridge. He turned up one evening with a bottle of black-market Scotch he’d been slipped by the father of a grateful patient, and it was like him to take his time, waiting till the meal was over and my housemate had gone out and then choosing his words carefully.

  ‘You know, old girl, I’ve always let you have your head. But you’ll forgive me if I get something off my chest?’

  Dad’s advice was worth listening to so I said, ‘Go on then, fire away.’

  ‘This bottle we’ve been enjoying was a gift from the father of a lad who’ll be lucky to be upright again. I see too much of that kind of thing to be wildly happy that you are so near London.’ I understood his concern. London had become the theatre of a monstrous drama. The carefree evenings of the early months of the new-found dark of the blackout, when an amiable gaiety still flourished amid companionable cigarettes and intimate nudges and lingering conversations, had given way to a vast hush as the city contracted to the arena of ferocious distraction.

  ‘But where else could we go?’ I asked.

  Dad put down his empty glass. ‘Between you and me, it would be a kindness if you’d go up to Bamburgh, if only to keep an eye on your grandparents.’

  I had gathered that our grandparents were finding the war difficult. Margaret was becoming more arthritic and all the spryer help had either joined the Women’s Land Army or had enlisted and were off fighting the war. But it was the thought of Nat’s safety that decided me. Northumberland, with its stretches of sand and the seas with peaceable eiders gently crooning and those wide, windswept skies, seemed to offer the promise of a suddenly available paradise.

  So after some deliberation Nat and I said goodbye to the physicist and although he was sorry to see us go I could see that he was pleased that the young woman who shared his bed could now move in. For some weeks I’d been encountering her, wrapped nonchalantly in nothing but a towel while conducting a vigorous political debate with her lover as he took his bath. I was rather in awe of her: she seemed so sure of herself, and of her view of the world and how she was going to change it.

  When I think of those years now, as I write this, they come back to me as a hallowed time: my young self lying at night, cocooned in the Blue Room at Dowlands, on the lumpen mattress which I’d lugged on to the floor, with Nat curled beside me, his soft moth breath in my ear.

  Perhaps it was this, that then there were only the two of us, Nat and me, and not another living soul to distract from my love for him.

  To everyone’s surprise, Nat was a hit with Grandad. He pulled at Grandad’s gold watch chain, an item commanding the most distant respect when we were children, plucked unrestrainedly at his beard and wildly unkempt eyebrows and, to his own vast delight, took his first independent steps staggering towards Grandad’s encouraging outstretched hand.

  It was more predictable that Nat would become a fast favourite with Margaret. She made him pastry balls to play with, soldiers out of wooden pegs, and cut up an old sealskin jacket, out of which she skilfully made a toy seal, its eyes made from boot buttons which somehow produced a most eloquent expression on the seal’s face. The jacket had belonged to Aunt Char so this was a sign of how far Nat had won Margaret’s heart.

  Grandmother was another story. Nat, with Fred’s colouring, bore no obvious physical resemblance to Magda but that would not have been enough to pacify Grandmother. She was anti-Semitic in the manner that her generation was – not easy for us to understand but as much a feature of the times as church on Sunday and servants and knickers with long elasticated legs against the cold.

  The presence in her establishment of a Jewish baby represented for my grandmother the conscientious discharge of duty but when Blanche once visited I was grateful for its flinty terms. Blanche arrived hoping, I could tell, for a scene and when she began to indulge her love for melodrama Grandmother coldly put her in her place.

  ‘I don’t regard it as tragic at all,’ she pronounced. ‘Betsy’s looking after the child very adequately. He never knew his mother and there’s no reason to suppose he’ll miss her now.’

  Though it was apparent from her tone that what was intended by this was that the absence of a Jewish mother was very much for the best, I admit that I was relieved by her unusual show of support. But I did wonder how far it would prove correct. It would be odd, I reflected, if Nat didn’t at some point yearn for the mother he had never known. But I told myself I was prepared to deal with that in good time.

  Blanche left rather huffily, promising to send on a parcel of wool for Margaret to ‘knit something for Baby’. I was annoyed by ‘Baby’ and doubly annoyed because Margaret’s arthritic hands were paining her. But I needn’t have worried because the parcel never arrived.

  My Cambridge fantasy of the Northumbrian seascape was tempered by the reality of war. The east coast was strategically prepared for attack and the long bare beaches of my childhood were fortified by ugly pillboxes and strung with repelling barbed wire. Old cars filled with stones stood in the sands defying German tanks to land. And a causeway of concrete giant’s teeth now stretched forbiddingly to Holy Island.

  But we learned to negotiate these safeguards. And one day, by St Aidan’s Dunes, we met Bev and Eddie.

  A stocky little dark-haired boy, much of Nat’s age, was hurling stones into the sea and Nat, who wasn’t a shy child, joined in. Quite soon they were flinging bladderwrack at each other, leaving me and the boy’s mother relieved of our duty as our children’s companions.

  She introduced herself with ‘I’m Bev. Smoke?’ and we sat down together in the dry sand of the dunes.

  God, how we used to smoke. I’m amazed we don’t all have lung cancer. I still sometimes miss the special companionableness of smoking with a friend.

  Bev was what in that part of the world is still called ‘bonny’ – which is to say she was strong-boned, fair-complexioned and grey-eyed and had the carriage of a queen. I instinctively liked the way she looked but when I got to know her what I liked even more was her indifference to anything political. She was all for fighting the war but that was as far as her politics went. I once said to her, pretending to be shocked, though I wasn’t at heart and this was simply a position I considered it necessary to adopt at the time, ‘But you must vote, Bev. Women went to prison for our right to vote,’ and she said, ‘They went to prison for their right, not mine.’

  That day when we sat in the sands smoking was the beginning of an important friendship and also an abiding friendship between our two sons. Quite early on I told Bev about Fred.

  ‘His dad’s in the Navy,’ she said, nodding at Eddie. ‘He’s a fisherman, has his own boat, so it was home from home really.’

  It would have seemed rude not to counter with where Nat’s father was so I said, rather between gritted teeth, ‘Nat’s dad’s a CO.’

  ‘A conchy?’

  I nodded, disloyally adding, ‘Not that I agree
with him.’

  ‘He’s entitled to his opinion,’ Bev said, which is an attitude a whole lot rarer than it should be.

  Bev, it turned out, was a great reader. It wasn’t that day but some days later when we met again that I had with me a copy of Jane Eyre. I was rereading the Brontës, probably as part of my inner campaign of keeping my end up by defying Fred. He had no time for the Brontës and dismissed them as ‘hysterical’.

  ‘I like that book. She’s a canny one, that Jane.’

  I asked, because I was interested, ‘Have you read any of her other novels?’ and when she said she hadn’t I invited her to Dowlands to look at the library.

  She read all of the Brontës after that, though Jane Eyre remained her favourite. But she also found books I had never looked at, Maeterlinck’s Life of the Bee, for example, which she recommended to me and which, when I read it, I could hardly believe I had overlooked. She expressed some serious aversions too. Tess of the D’Urbervilles she wouldn’t hear a good word about. She worked on a farm herself and was scornful of Hardy’s professed agricultural know-how. ‘Gloomy old bugger’ was her verdict. She was against anything that didn’t have a happy ending.

  Grandmother Tye took quite a shine to Bev, probably because Bev had a natural respect for the old order. She had strong opinions, but not revolutionary ones, and I can see how Grandmother might find that a relief after Fred. She never said so, but if her heart had been softer his avowal of pacifism might have broken it. She had lost her son, his father, in the last war and although Oswald was never mentioned his photo, a portrait of a flat-faced pallid man with a moustache and a monocle, had pride of place on her dressing table.

  And I’m sure it had something to do with Bev that the collection of old ballgowns put away in blue tissue paper was made over to us by Grandmother. As a result of her largesse, Bev and I swanned about in revamped silk chiffon and even some mink trimmings which we sewed on to the collars of our coats, so that we became a local byword for style.